Summer Of Outdoor Living - My Rose Garden

As anyone who gardens can tell you, the weather can be a harsh mistress at times. You hope for sunny skies and are blessed with an unseasonably late snowfall; you pray for rain and receive two weeks of arid winds.

Any gardener who lives in Northern Alberta - OK, technically, the city I live in is roughly in the geographical center of the province, but look at the latitude, my dears! - and who craves a colorful display of summer flowers, is reasonably assured of success. My own garden was full of beautiful blooms every summer, each in their season.

...but any foolhardy soul who lives where I do and craves a garden full of roses is an incurable optimist, and flirting with disaster every summer. You plan, you plant, you nurture and protect those tender shoots against the elements. Surely your efforts will be rewarded when Winter looses its hold and Spring once again warms the garden.

Well - it ain't necessarily so...

What rose fancier would not enjoy the glorious blooms of an espaliered Climbing Rose, or the intoxicating fragrance of Blanche de Crecy, or an American Beauty Rose? Unfortunately, one of the biggest problems we face here with growing roses, is over-wintering them. Tea roses are amazingly fragrant and rewarding to grow, an almost nothing beats an old English rose for heady scent, but few of them can withstand the rigors of this climate.

To be sure, some avid rose fans here have great success with the less hardy, "fancy" varieties, but unless you are able to create the perfect micro-climate for your tender buds, many varieties simply will not survive for more than a year or two.

The general rule of thumb for our area, zone 3A, is that you should count on replacing up to a quarter of your tender roses each year. In a very cold or long winter, you may lose more, but usually that is the norm.

The hardy roses often come with a one or two year warranty, and the reputable greenhouses are more than willing to replace any guaranteed stock on presentation of your receipt and warranty card. Tender teas and old fashioned varieties are sometimes grafted onto hardy root stock, but this can lead to a different set of thorns, if you will. If the grafted rose, as so often happens, is killed by the cold, the root will often produce shoots of the original stock. This can lead to a very prickly and unrewarding state of affairs as you must now eradicate the tenacious wild parent, notorious for spreading just where you don't want it to be. Wild roses are lovely in their proper place in nature, but not in my rose garden, thank you.

Originally from Arabia, roses can survive some amazingly harsh climes, but they are up against it in this neck of the woods. To combat this lack of loveliness, interested horticulturists at a number of research centers in Canada have tackled the problem of adapting tender stock to our Canadian winters.

The common wild rose is lovely and fragrant, but far too aggressive to be contained in a garden plot. Early attempts at breeding hardy roses for the prairies produced some hardy and fragrant entries, such as the Hansa Rose and Thérèse Bugnet, (pronounced Boon-yay) but though they have good color and heavenly rose fragrance, the buds quickly lose their rose-like form, and the petals tend to drop very quickly. As well, they have an untidy habit of growth, so constant pruning is required to achieve any kind of shrubby shape. To entertain more than one of these in your garden unrestrained is to flirt with achieving a thicket worthy of one that any the wicked witch would be proud to conjure to contain a Sleeping Beauty.

We have enough trouble containing the enthusiasm of our next-door neighbor's raspberry canes, let alone a couple of stampeding wild roses.

Another problem we have has always been containing our own enthusiasm for these elegant, delightfully scented garden gems. We have been known to "rescue" plants, especially roses from the back of an overstocked shelf at our local garden centers. We tell ourselves that we are saving these sad specimens from certain death by lack of water and neglect, but really, we just can't bear the idea that one of these lovely plants might not have the chance to gladden the heart of some lucky gardener.

The research center at Morden, world renown for its breeding programs, has had considerable good fortune producing several prize winning additions to the rose family, and we are proud to have a number of them blooming in our garden.

This year we have been particularly blessed. The season got off to a rocky start, though. Spring was late and winter seemed to linger in the winds for an eternity. When Summer did arrive, it brought continued cold winds and raging drought. Finally, the benison of three days of rain brought things slowly to life.

Now that the rains have come again, and continue to visit regularly, the garden has sprung to life. Every plant has surged up, offering multitudes of blooms to the sun. Our winter-jaded spirits are soothed and renewed by the riot of colors and fragrances that waft in my window on the slightest breeze, straight from the heart of my rose garden.